SWAT team outcomes all too predictable

The police had intelligence that Corey Navarette, an Orange resident, was selling Oxycodone and Percocet, and they had intelligence that he had access to firearms and might use them.

Given this understanding, the outcome was pretty much known long before a heavily armed state police Special Tactical Operations team busted down Mr. Navarette's apartment door at 5 a.m. on July 3 and shot him dead.

They said Mr. Navarette confronted them with a gun, but declined comment on whether drugs were also found. Details on these killings are never released until after a drawn-out investigation, the outcome of which, of course, we already know — the killing was justifiable.

Some will say we shouldn't shed tears for an alleged drug dealer, and that we should embrace Mr. Navarette's killing as an acceptable loss in the quest to maintain law and order.

But shouldn't we be concerned that our society is fast becoming militarized; that routine police activities are increasingly being carried out by SWAT teams outfitted with a mounting array of military armaments?

According to criminologist Peter Kraska, for example, warrant service makes up some 80 percent of SWAT responses nationwide, with some jurisdictions requiring SWAT units to serve all drug warrants.

In a country in which, as President Obama once said, people like to cling to their guns, bad things are the most likely outcome when SWAT teams bust into homes unannounced in the dead of the night, or the wee hours of the morning.

It is disconcerting enough when the target of the warrant is killed, but what about the innocent lives being taken in these raids?

What about the 75-year-old minister, the Rev. Accelyne Williams, who died from a heart attack in 1994, when the Boston SWAT team stormed his apartment at midnight, only to learn later that they had the wrong apartment?

What about 68-year-old Eurie Stamps, who was shot and killed in his home in Framingham by a SWAT team member, who claimed he tripped and accidentally discharged his weapon. Meanwhile, minutes before the raid, the target of the warrant had been arrested down the street from the home.

What about the 24 people who were left homeless in Fitchburg in 1996, when a SWAT team deployed flash-bang grenades that burned down an entire apartment complex, while injuring six police officers?

In the "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The militarization of America's Police Force," Arthur Radley Balco argues that the increasing prevalence of SWAT units is engendering "all of the threats the Founders fear were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn't have anticipated."

He argued that police officers today "are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose," and that "legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent."

"Police today are armed, dressed, trained, and conditioned like soldiers," he wrote. "They're given greater protections from civil and criminal liability than normal citizens. They are permitted to violently break into homes, often at night, to enforce laws … often on rather flimsy evidence of wrongdoing. Negligence and errors in judgment that result in needless terror, injury and death are rarely held accountable. Citizens who make similar errors under the same circumstances almost always face criminal charges, usually felonies."

While concluding that America today is far from being a police state, Mr Balco wisely noted that it would be "foolish to wait until it becomes one to get concerned."